We offer DNS masking, which allows you to show searchers search.YOURAGENCY.gov (instead of search.USA.gov). Follow these steps to mask your domain. Please note that due to limitations in the size of our SSL certificate, we are only able to offer top level domain masking: i.e., search.youragency.gov but not search.subagency.youragency.gov.

Create a search subdomain for your domain. If search is already in use in your environment, you could use find or findit as your subdomain.

Create a CNAME in your external DNS records for search.youragency.gov. Point it to yoursitehandle.sites.infr.search.usa.gov. Your site handle is listed on the settings page in the Search Admin Center.

For example: if your site handle is abc, the DNS record would look like this:

search.youragency.gov CNAME abc.sites.infr.search.usa.gov

NOTE: if your site handle contains a ., please replace it with a - in your DNS record, e.g., for site handle abc.gov.search the DNS record would look like this:

search.youragency.gov CNAME abc-gov-search.sites.infr.search.usa.gov

After your DNS record has been added, email us to request to be added to our SSL certificate. If your CNAME is not on our SSL certificate, browser security warnings will appear when your search results page attemps to load over HTTPS. It generally takes a few days for these requests to get through our queue.

Your domain mask will work as soon as these two steps are complete.

When your DNS record is in place and you have received confirmation that your domain mask has been added to our SSL certificate, change your search box’s form code action from search.usa.gov/search to search.youragency.gov/search.

Did you know? Any search site within your domain may use the same domain mask and CNAME record, even if the CNAME is not associated with that particular site’s handle. To implement an existing mask for a search box, just do Step 2, above.

Did you know? Once the CNAME is set up, if visitors to your site happen to truncate the URL in the browser bar to http://search.youragency.gov (without any parameters), they’re automatically redirected to your agency’s homepage at http://www.youragency.gov.

Did you know? Most of our customers use a search.youragency.gov mask (such as search.nih.gov). If the search subdomain is already used by another application, you can use find or findit, such as find.irs.gov or findit.state.gov. We no longer support other subdomain patterns.

After you’ve logged in and added a site with your official government email, you can add your coworkers to your site.

You can add anyone you’d like to your site—with or without a .gov or .mil email address. Email addresses outside the .gov or .mil domains must be associated with a business. Personal emails, such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com, are not allowed.

Do you want to promote a set of pages or resources? We recommend you create a Graphics Best Bet if you have more than two recommendations on a given topic.

Best Bets appear at the top of the results page when a searcher’s query matches the text of its title, description, or keywords.

Best Bets: Text

Text best bets have the same look as standard web results. They’re listed under the heading, Recommended by YourSite.

See the sample results page below that shows a text best bet displayed on TSA.gov for a search on razors.

Add an Individual Text Best Bet

URL. Add the URL of the web page that you want to promote. Make sure the URL is properly formatted, and includes the protocol (either http:// or https://).

Title and Description. Add the title and description of the web page that you want to promote. Each field can have up to 255 characters. Titles and descriptions are visible to searchers.

Status and Publish Dates. By default, newly created Best Bets are Active. If you don’t want your Best Bet to display, set it to Inactive. The default start date is the day on which you create the best bet. The default end date is null, so it will stay up forever until you decide to take it down. You can opt to specify other start and end dates using the date pickers.

Match Keywords Only? You have the option of having your Best Bets display only for exact keyword matches, and not for title or discription matches. If you select this option, be sure to include all query terms you want the Best Bet to display for, including terms you have used in the title and description.

Keywords. Keywords are optional and they’re not visible to searchers. Add specific words or phrases that aren’t already included in the visible title or description. Common keywords include synonyms, acronyms, compound words, plural variations, misspellings, slang, or other variants. Enter each keyword (word or phrase up to 255 characters) in a separate field. Use your search Analytics to inform your keyword lists. Keywords are not case sensitive, but are exact matches.

URL. Make sure the URL is properly formatted, and includes the protocol (either http:// or https://).

Description

Optional fields:

Start date

End date

Keywords

Match_Keywords_Only. Enter a 1 in this column if you want the Best Bet to respond only to the query terms and phrases you’ve specified in this column. Note that selecting this option means you need to list all terms or phrases you want the Best Bet to respond to.

Status. If you leave this column blank, the Best Bet will default to Active and will display to users. Enter 0 to set the Best Bet to Inactive.

Save the file with a .csv extension and upload it.

Bulk upload updates existing Best Bets (matching on the URL field) and adds new Best Bets. To turn off Best Bets, either use the Remove button in the Admin Center Best Bets list view, or set the Best Bet to Inactive in the edit view.

Best Bets: Graphics

Recommended items are displayed in two columns, and you have the option of including an image. We show the most relevant Graphics Best Bet for the query, with the heading, Recommended by YourSite.

Two columns with a collection of links and an image displayed on USA.gov for a search on wildfires.

Two columns with a collection of links only displayed on USA.gov for a search on housing.

A single link to a specific web page and an image displayed on WhiteHouse.gov for a search on jobs.

Add a Graphics Best Bet

Title. Add the title (up to 255 characters) of the web page or collection of web pages that you want to promote. The title is visible to searchers.

Title URL. Add the URL of the primary web page that you want to promote. This field is optional.

Status and Publish Dates. By default, newly created Best Bets are Active. If you don’t want your Best Bet to display, set it to Inactive. The default start date is the day on which you create the best bet. The default end date is null, so it will stay up forever until you decide to take it down. You can opt to specify other start and end dates using the date pickers.

Image. You can opt to add an image. The file should be a GIF, JPG or PNG with a maximum size of 512 KB. The system will resize your image to fit.

Match Keywords Only? You have the option of having your Best Bets display only for exact keyword matches, and not for title and link title matches. If you select this option, be sure to include all query terms you want the Best Bet to display for, including terms you have used in the title and description.

Keywords. Keywords are optional and they’re not visible to searchers. Add specific words or phrases that aren’t already included in the visible title or link titles. Common keywords include synonyms, acronyms, compound words, plural variations, misspellings, slang, or other variants. Enter each keyword (word or phrase up to 255 characters) in a separate field. Use your search Analytics to inform your keyword lists. Keywords are not case sensitive, but are exact matches.

Links. Enter a title and URL for each link. There is no limit on the number of links. Use the list icons (“hamburger buttons”) on the left to rearrange the display order of the links. The two columns populate by rows, so if you have three links, you would have two links in the top row, and one link in the left column of the second row. The link titles are visible to searchers.

When Searchers See Your Best Bets: Graphics

For searchers to see a best bet on your site, it must match their query and be relevant and active.

It Matches Their Query

Searchers see your best bets when their query:

Matches any or all words in the title, description, or link titles, or

This best bet would display for searches on estate tax (exact title match), estate (partial title match), tax on the estate (title match that includes stopwords), estate taxes (title match for singular/plural variant), property tax (partial link title match), propertey tax (link title match with a slight misspelling), and death tax (exact keyword match), among other queries.

It would not display for searches on death, death property, taxes after death, fair value, as keywords matches must be exact, and these queries are only partial keyword matches. It also would not display for estate property tax, as this is a partial match across multiple fields.

It Is Very Relevant

After we determine which best bets match the searcher’s query, we rank their relevance and display only the most relevant. We’ll display up to two text best bets, and up to one graphics best bet. Default relevance is determined first by title, then by description (text best bets) or link titles (graphics best bets), and lastly by keywords. Date is used as a tiebreaker if the entries’ scores based on the above three factors are equal. We display the newer Best Bet.

If you’ve selected Match Keywords Only, then only keywords are used to determine relevance.

Did you know? Use the Search Page Alert feature to add a text message to your search results page, which will appear at all times above all search results, regardless of the query.

Did you know? Analyze the number of impressions and clicks and clickthru rate for each best bet on the Monthly Reports page. Use the data to inform your titles, descriptions, and keywords and your decision to deactivate or delete an entry.

Did you know? When you use the sitelimit parameter to scope the search to a subsection of your website, we’ll apply this sitelimit to your Best Bets so searchers see recommended pages from within that folder or subdomain only.

Your pre-launch checklist will be unique to your agency’s workflow, requirements, and deadlines. Below is a typical checklist.

Double Check Your Content Settings

1. Have you told us which domain(s) you want to search? List one or more domains that you want to search on the first page of web results. Some agencies opt to leave out the ‘www’ to include all subdomains (for example, list usa.gov to include answers.usa.gov, blog.usa.gov, publications.usa.gov, etc). Some agencies especially department-level portals opt to also include their bureaus’ websites (for example, Commerce.gov includes commerce.gov, noaa.gov, trade.gov, etc.)

2. Have we indexed your your content? We follow search engine optimization (SEO) best practices and leverage your XML sitemaps to monitor for new content. Verify also that you have a robots.txt file. These two files are typically located in the root directory of your website (i.e., exampleagency.gov/robots.txt and exampleagency.gov/sitemap.xml, respectively). Also verify that your robots.txt file allows our user agent (usasearch) to access your public content.

3. Have you told us about your RSS feeds? We love RSS feeds. Tell us about all of your feeds, even if you opt not to show them (see #5 below). They’re a quick way for us to index your new and updated content, in addition to the content listed on your sitemap (see above). (Tip: Preview your feeds from the RSS page in the Admin Center to confirm that we’ve indexed your content.)

4. Have you told us about your social media accounts?Flickr photostreams, tweets, and YouTube videos are a great way to highlight your recent content and offer a single point of access to your various publishing channels.

Customize the Display of Your Search Results Page

5. Have you made the search results page look like your website? Customize the brand (font, colors, logo, favicon, and navigation links) of your search results page to create a seamless experience for users as they search and browse your website.

6. Have you told us what to show on your results page? Turn on (or off) the inline modules and facets that you want to appear on your search results page. You can change the default settings on the Display Overview page in the Admin Center.

Connect Your Site to Search.gov

Most agencies add these two snippets of code to the template(s) in their websites or content management systems (rather than adding them to individual pages).

7. Does your search box point to Search.gov? Update your search box form code point to our service so that, when users execute a search, they’ll see your Search.gov-hosted results page.

8. Do you have our Javascript tag on your webpages? This Javascript powers the suggestions for type-ahead and related searches. It also provides data on your trending URLs on the Site Overview page in the Admin Center.

Set Up Nice-to-Have Features (Optional)

9. Have you masked your domain? We offer DNS masking, which allows you to show searchers search.YOURSITE.gov (instead of search.USA.gov). If you leverage DNS masking you will have to change your search box form action from search.usa.gov to search.YOURSITE.gov. Be sure to alert us you will be adding a domain mask, so we can add you to our SSL certificate before you update your search box form code.

10. Have you added the Javascripts for your other third-party web services to your results page? If you have a third-party service running on your website, you likely want it to run on your results page. Agencies often include their Foresee, Google Analytics, Omniture, or WebTrends code, among others. If your federal website participates in the Digital Analytics Program, you do not need to take any action: DAP code is included on your results page, by default.

Don’t Forget SEO

11. Have you registered your site with the major commercial search engines? Register for both Bing Webmaster Tools(External link) and Google Webmaster Tools(External link) to maximize the coverage of your content in their search results.

We call several different indexes when serving search results, and we present results from each of these indexes in a separate module. Each module loads when there are relevant search results to display. Each module has a code, and you’ll see these codes in the Download Details csv files available through the Queries or Clicks pages of the Admin Center analytics section.

The Queries page lists the number of times a search query (that is, a word or string of words) was entered in the search box on your site by a unique searcher.

Data are shown for the present month-to-date by default. You can change the time period by selecting a different month or year and re-generating the report.

You can also toggle between filtered and unfiltered views of the data by clicking on the filter icon () in the top navigation bar. The filtered data represent our best effort to show you real searches performed by your site’s visitors. The unfiltered data include nearly all searches and clicks. Only known spiders (such as Bingbot and Googlebot) are excluded.

Data are available in the Admin Center from the past 13 months.

Top Queries

Top 1,000. You’ll see a list, in frequency order, of the 1,000 most popular queries for your selected time period.

Top 1,000 by query. Enter any specific term or phrase into the Query search box. Re-generate the report to see the top 1,000 queries that contain that term or phrase and its stemmed equivalents.

For example, below are the top 10 queries related to housing on USA.gov in August 2013.

house of representatives

housing

speaker of the house

white house

house minority leader

housing assistance

house majority leader

speaker of the house 2013

the white house

houses

Download Details

You can download a detailed CSV (comma separated values) file for any search term. There’s one line for each time this query was run. This CSV file gives you access to the raw search logs, including:

The date and time of the query

The query (It is embedded in the request URL. Look for the text following ‘query=’.)

Where the person was when they ran the search (We use the ISO-2 alpha standard for country codes and ISO 3166-2 codes for country subdivisions.)

The modules loaded in response to the query (Our Module Codes page provides a key of the codes and names.)

The kind of device and browser they were using

Clicks from a Query and Queries Leading to a Click

Select “View Clicks” to view the top clicked URLs for each query.

If you clicked on “View Clicks” for the house of representatives example above, you’d see that the top URLs clicked for that query are:

www.house.gov

www.house.gov/representatives

www.house.gov/representatives/find

From this list of clicked URLs, you’d be able to select “View Queries” to view the top queries that led to a click for each URL.

If you clicked on the first-listed www.house.gov in the example above, you’d see that the top queries leading to a click on that URL are:

house of representatives

congress

congress members

congress representatives

You can loop through or drill down into this list for any set of clicks and queries.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The click-through rate (CTR) is the the number of clicks from a query divided by the number of queries (multiplied by 100 to be expressed as a percentage).

High or low CTR’s may indicate that users are not able to find relevant results. A CTR can be over 100%: if a user enters a query, clicks on a link, hits ‘back’ in their browser, returns to the search results, and clicks again, the CTR for that query would be 200% (2 clicks divided by 1 query, multiplied by 100 = 200%).

Did you know? The Monthly Report section gives a bird’s-eye view of the number of queries and clicks on your site each month. The Site Overview provides a snapshot of what has been happening on your site in the past day or so.

The Clicks page shows what searchers clicked on from your search results pages, and the number of times each of those items was clicked during the selected date range. The current month is shown by default, and the date can be adjusted using the date selectors at the top of the page and re-generating the report.

You can also toggle between filtered and unfiltered views of the data by clicking on the filter icon () in the top navigation bar. The filtered data represent our best effort to show you real searches performed by your site’s visitors. The unfiltered data include nearly all searches and clicks. Only known spiders (such as Bingbot and Googlebot) are excluded.

Data are available in the Admin Center from the past 13 months.

Reading the Report Table

Top URLs Clicked

The top 1,000 most clicked-on URLs from your results page for the selected time period, with the most popular first.

Download Details

You can download the raw click logs for any URL in the list. The CSV (comma separated values) file has one line for each time this URL was clicked. Details avialable include:

Date and Time of the click,

Query: The query they ran before clicking the search result,

Position: Where in the results page was the result they clicked, e.g. 5 means the searcher clicked the fifth result in the list,

Request: The clicked URL (It is embedded in the request URL. Look for the text following ‘u=’.) and its position on the page,

Referrer: The webpage the person was on when they ran the search, this column also includes the query,

Vertical and Modules: The modules loaded in response to the query (Our Module Codes tip provides a key of the codes and names.),

Device, Browser, and OS: The kind of device and browser they were using, and

Country Code and Region: Where the user was, physically. We use the ISO-2 alpha standard for country codes and ISO 3166-2 codes for country subdivisions.

# of Clicks

Select a hyperlinked number in the # of Clicks column to view the queries that led to the clicks for that URL (the Queries leading to a Click report).

If you then click on a number in the # of Clicks column for a query on the Queries leading to a Click page, you will see all the URLs that were clicked on from that query’s results pages (the Clicks from a Query report). This is the same report you see when you follow a # of Clicks link from the Queries page.

You can loop through or drill down into this list for any set of clicks and queries.

Did you know? The Monthly Report gives a bird’s-eye view of the number of queries and clicks each month. The Site Overview provides a snapshot of what has been happening on your site today.

Do you want to get searchers to a specific web page as quickly as possible? Create a Routed Query.

A routed query skips the search results page and automatically directs visitors to a web page of your choice for very specific queries. Use query routing to save visitors the extra step of reading through search results links by taking them directly to your content pages.

We recommend creating a routed query for top tasks that have a good content page but less-than-ideal search results.

Add a Routed Query

Routed Query URL. Add the URL of the web page that you want to direct visitors to.

Routed Query Description. Add a brief description to help you remember why you created this entry and what it does. Descriptions aren’t used for indexing or visible to searchers.

Keywords. Add the specific words or phrases used to trigger the routing. Searchers will only be directed to the URL above when their query term exactly matches one of the listed keywords. Common keywords include synonyms, acronyms, compound words, misspellings, slang, or other variants. Enter each keyword (word or phrase up to 255 characters) in a separate field.

Examples of How It Works

Private industry has been using query routing for some time. If you go to Home Depot(External link) and search for a general term like carpet, you’re routed to their carpet navigation page. If you search for a more specific term like vanities, you get standard search results.

Using USA.gov an as example, every time someone goes to USA.gov and searches for any of the following terms (must be exact matches), they’ll automatically be directed to the USA.gov Unclaimed Money from the Government page.

missing money

unclaimed assets

unclaimed funds

unclaimed money

unclaimed money in my name

unclaimed property

If they get routed to the Unclaimed Money from the Government and search again for one of these terms, they’ll get the standard list of search results. We won’t take people in an endless loop.

If they search for something not on the above list, like show me missing money, they’ll still get the normal search results.

There may be times when you want to add a system alert to your search results page. For instance, during a site redesign, you may wish to inform searchers that your site is in transition.

Use the Search Page Alert feature to add a text message to your search results page, which will appear at all times above all search results, regardless of the query. Enter a title and text for the alert, set the status to active, and hit Save to turn on your alert. The appearance of the alert is not customizable.

See, for example, the custom alert on Defense.gov announcing their migration to a new system.

Did you know? See also our closely related feature Best Bets, which allows you to recommend individual results or sets of results, which will appear only when a searcher’s query matches the text of their titles, descriptions, or keywords.